I’ll admit that the polls do not look good for Obama in Pennsylvania, but that is not the only measure we should be looking at.
Only registered Democrats can vote for their party’s candidates in the primary, and Obama is hoping the recruits will help him overcome Clinton’s solid lead — 12 points in one poll taken last weekend. At stake are 158 delegates to this summer’s Democratic national convention — the biggest bloc of delegates still to be awarded.
Since last fall’s election, statewide Democratic enrollment has swelled by more than 111,000 — an increase of about 3% in less than six months, which state elections Commissioner Harry VanSickle said is unprecedented. With days to go, Democratic registration is barely 5,000 votes shy of a record 4 million.
“The volume is very large, very steady,” said Jim Forsythe, director of voter services in Chester County, a Philadelphia suburb where Democratic enrollment grew by nearly 7% — the second-largest gain among the 67 counties.
The smaller statewide enrollments of Republicans and voters not registered in either party have declined slightly.
Yesterday, I managed to register five independents as Democrats, all of whom suggested that they were either leaning toward, or supporting Barack Obama. I only encountered one person that is supporting or even leaning toward Clinton, and no one expressed any support for McCain. And this was in a heavily white, heavily Catholic, lower middle class neighborhood in Chester County, Pennsylvania. One 50-ish white guy did tell me I was crazy to support a guy that goes to a ‘I-Hate-Whitie church’, but that was the only interaction I had that showed the Rev. Wright flap is negatively affecting the race.
But that is just my anecdotal experience, and others have seen much stronger Wright effects. In the end, the outcome in Pennsylvania is more likely to be influenced by the meta-narrative that is taking hold that Clinton has a 10% chance of winning the nomination.
Regardless of the outcome in Pennsylvania, which won’t have any effect on Obama’s eventual nomination, the fact that there is a contest at all is going to help the Democratic Party.
Mining the state’s computerized voter registry for trends, the Pennsylvania Department of State, which oversees elections, has found that:
• Since January, more than 100,000 Pennsylvanians who were not previously registered to vote did so.
• In that time, more than 68,000 registered voters changed their affiliation to one of the major parties, with those switching to Democratic registration outpacing those switching to Republican by more than 3-1.
With the strong registration drives going on this weekend, the eventual numbers will be even more striking. It doesn’t help the Democrats to have the Clinton campaign beating up on our nominee, but there is the unintended benefit that added interest is leading to more registered Democrats.
The Clintons are using the old tactic of phonebanking, while the Obama people are out at the malls, corporate centers, churches, and going door-to-door. The Democrats should benefit greatly, provided our nominee is not mortally wounded in the process.
But those looking at the polls should take heed. With independents flocking to sign up as Dems, the likely voter models can’t be too accurate. Can Clinton maintain the fiction that she still has a chance for another five weeks? How strongly will Obama outperform the polls?
The biggest shame of all is that registrations end on Monday. If we had another month-plus to do voter reg, there is no telling how much strength we could add to the Democratic Party here. But Gov. Ed Rendell has endorsed Clinton, and he has no interest in that.
